Ebook battle made big news in 2014

Many of the big fiction books of 2014 were not published in 2014: An Oprah Winfrey pick, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings; Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch, a Hachette release so in demand that even Amazon left it alone; and a handful of novels helped by movie adaptations – Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken. Phil Klay’s book of contemporary war stories, Redeployment, won the U.S. National Book Award, but a people’s prize for top literary hardcover of 2014 would likely go to a novel about the Second World War, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which has sold more than 180,000 copies, according to Nielsen Book-Scan, which tracks around 80 per cent of sales.